4 ways to get connected in the biggest business community in the world.

Linkedin has over 575m users and each person has a Social Selling Index. This link should take you to yours. Mine stands at 80/100. How are you doing? We're working to improve the SSI for our clients and in this episode of SPEAK|pr I share how we are completing the clients profiles, adding connections and curating content.

The SSI comprises of:

• Establishing your brand.
• Finding the right people.
• Engage with insights.
• Build relationship.

Let us know if we can help you.
About this show:

SPEAK|Pr is for business owners to #getnoticed and is brought to you by EASTWEST PR Agency owner and entrepreneur Jim James who has started 8 businesses on 3 continents.

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Transcript

Jim James: 0:31

Today, we're going to talk about LinkedIn, because we're helping a client improve their social selling index. This is all content now that can be shared and measured, and it can deliver a greater ROI for you on one of the world's greatest business-to-business social media platforms. Going to the LinkedIn SSI page will bring you to a social selling dashboard which will show you your rank in your industry and in your network. It'll give you an index that is variable, as it changes weekly and monthly depending on how much work you're putting into it. Now, the question is, what is the significance of LinkedIn and how it can help you and your business? Well, LinkedIn, as we know, is now owned by Microsoft. It is a worldwide body that eclipses the traditional Facebook, YouTube, or any other place for sharing your business-to-business connections. What I like about LinkedIn as well is that their statistics are global. Of the 570 million registered LinkedIn users, 150 million are in America. When it comes to users in Asia, 42 million are from China, 50 million from India, 10 million from Indonesia, and 6 million from the Philippines. The population of Singapore is only 6 million, and 2 million of them are on LinkedIn. The UK has over 25 million users, France has 16 million, and the Netherlands has 7 million. You get the idea. LinkedIn really is the platform for business-to-business regardless of where we are around the world. I'm sharing about LinkedIn today, because we're actively working on improving a client's SSI, and it's working. My own SSI for Jim James is 80% out of 100. The first metric is to increasing your SSI is to establish your professional brand. The second is finding the right people. The third is engaging with insights, and the fourth is building relationships. Each of these four metrics contributes 25% to your SSI. With a ranking of 80 out of 100, I'm in the top 1% within my industry and top 1% of my individual network. Interestingly enough, sales professionals and PR communications professionals have an average SSI of 28. That's from the classification that I use for my own job. Within my own network, the average is 47, which shows that my network is slightly on the higher end and almost double the average. So, how do we get there? Well, when it comes to the metric of establishing a professional brand, I'm at 23%. We do that through posting on and completing our profile. I'm going to give you a list of some of the things that we need to have on our profiles in order to get 25% of that metric or at least close to it. If you're not getting close to 25, then you're wasting an opportunity. It's like taking an exam. Even if you just fill in a couple of sentences, you've got a greater chance of getting a higher mark than if you leave some questions blank. Of course, you need to have at least your name, job title, profile picture, banners, and company name on your profile. Where people then miss out is they don't mention their client niche sector, or they don't include their products and services, which they should. You can add how long you've been in the industry. You can add the problems that you're solving with your solution. You can also look at how you are targeting a particular market specifically. Ideally, you could get some testimonials from clients, former members of staff, partners, or anybody who's willing to give you a testimonial. Another error is that sometimes people are not putting in their experience and their education. It's worth putting all of those different dates in, because you could get matched with people who you went to the same university with that could now be of interest. For me, I went to Manchester University from 1986-1990 with a year in North Carolina Chapel Hill. By putting that in, I'm being introduced to people from those schools. We can also put skills, endorsements, and recommendations. These all contribute to the completeness of our LinkedIn profile, and this is going to help you boost that SSI. Next, finding the right people to connect with can be a function connecting to industry leaders and thought leaders, and joining groups. I personally have only got 15.6% on the metric about finding the right people, because I don't spend so much time proactively reaching out to people. But for our clients that we're doing this with, we've upgraded to the Sales Navigator program, and that is yielding a much higher score, because we're proactively finding people that might want their services. They're specifically looking for people in the procurement and manufacturing sector. Whereas with public relations, we're looking for other entrepreneurs, sales directors, marketing directors, public relations directors, and our services may be a little bit broader. I may not spend enough time reaching out to people, but what I do quite a lot of is engage with insights, and this is really about sharing articles and posts, and these don't have to be all of our own articles and posts. Another thing we could do is join groups, add those groups into your membership, and post articles into those groups. That's we're doing for this client. In my case, I'm posting my articles to groups on entrepreneurship or public relations, so I'm looking for people with a common interest, and I'm sharing thoughts and insights that might be interesting to them. It's not sales information, but information that might help them with their businesses. I've also taken up a couple of mentorship programs where we give guidance to people who have got questions about their careers. Sometimes, it's a little bit random, because people ask you questions like, "What should I do next?," and that's a little bit hard to reply to. On the building relationships metric, I've got the perfect score of 25 out of 25. This one here is all about building and finding trust with decision-makers. I work to connect to CEOs, managing directors, entrepreneurs, and people working for big companies. Finding those people on LinkedIn who are established thought leaders and have become part of their sphere of influence helps your own reputation. So, that was a short guide to the LinkedIn Social Selling Index. In the last three months, to grow our client's SSI, we increased our client's total connections by reaching out proactively through job title searches, and we also did that by geography. We're also trying to get these clients followers, because it's one thing to go out and follow people, but it's another to get people to follow us back, and that improves our authority index. I have about seven and a half thousand followers myself on LinkedIn, and I'd like to think that's a function of the content that I'm sharing. We're looking at certain kinds of job descriptions that we want to be pursuing, because their networks impact our networks. We're getting about a 40-50% connection request acceptance level, and that can be improved by sending out personalized emails, as we're doing now. We also have to be careful who we accept as there may be irrelevant introductions to business services. Profile views is another thing we like to track. For our client, we've increased their profile views significantly by posting on a frequency. Quite often, people post once a week, or every other week or so, but now, LinkedIn can be seen as a stream of posting, and that's why people then outsource that to an agency like us, because we're taking a client's content, altering the format slightly, and then posting it on LinkedIn as an article or a post. People may find that interesting, so they check out the client's profile, and that is when we ask those people if they would like to follow and connect, because they've already expressed an interest in our client. In terms of the articles, some of their articles are getting a good reach, and some are getting a bad reach. Interestingly enough, we posted about one of the client's daughters going to America to study athletics, and these kinds of posts actually have often greater traction than the generic business posts, which I have noticed as well when I post about my daughters. So, there seems to be a growing interest in LinkedIn on what people are doing in their personal lives, maybe because we're not as bombarded with"irrelevant" posts as we are on Facebook. So, the idea of posting content that is professional but also personal that might be about you or your interests seems to be both accepted and even getting more uplift. There was a poll recently by one person on LinkedIn, and that person found that women in the legal profession are getting more views on their posts than men are, and the question was whether this is because women are being more authentic and more genuine than men are, and maybe that's true. The other question was whether women just approve of other women's posts more. Either way, we can't prove it, but what's for sure is showing a little bit of one's personality and not making this a direct mail house is certainly working. We're finding that this combination of frequency of good content, reaching out to relevant people, finding people that are looking at us and following them back, and sharing useful information that's not strictly speaking about selling but is sharing and is working to improve the social index. Why does this matter? Why would you want to do it? Because we're in a position now where we're not meeting people. Going to functions has been replaced now with online meetings. I've noticed that for my own LinkedIn, a large number of people are finding me through the main homepage. In other words, they're not people that have been introduced to me or that I've met personally, yet have somehow heard about me, but in a digital fashion. And so, we have to then think about what we are saying about ourselves or what other people are saying about us online. Your professional brand, the right people, the right insights, and the connection of those with relationships are four of metrics you can track when it comes to your SSI. All of this can be done for free, of course, or you could upgrade to any of the Sales Navigator packages (Professional, Team, and Enterprise). It's not cheap, but it's proven to successfully grow your SSI. And as we've talked about in our SPEAK|pr methodology of Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know, plainly, LinkedIn is in the amplification part, but there is room for engagement, personalization, and storification. The SSI gives us an index, so that we can know how we're doing. We're measuring this for a client every month, and we're getting a good increase in their SSI through this formula of getting good content, sending it consistently, and then also getting different members of the organization to like and share posts, which gives us a multiplier effect. People often post on their ownn, but if they're part of an organization, they can definitely maximize that. So, the final part of what we're trying to do is making sure that everyone across the organization starts to look and feel the same just as they would if they were being seen at an event, and they can support one another online. As we know, social media is about being seen as much as anything else to be part of a trend or a community. If you're not using the community that's within your own company and your own partnership network, then you're missing a trick. The Progress Shed is an organization which I'm working with, and they're putting together a community where people share their thoughts, and everyone's agreed to promote posts mutually. I know this has been done very successfully by a group of photography enthusiasts where one person will post photographs and other people will comment on them directly. This helps drive traffic, because the algorithms are looking for information that other people have found interesting, so if we can find other people to express an interest, then the algorithms will pick that up and boost it. LinkedIn seems to have become the number one global business-to-business platform. I saw some other platforms in China trying, but it's the network effect of LinkedIn that makes it fairly unassailable. Regardless of where we're at in our careers or where we're at in our organization, as an entrepreneur, a salesperson, or whatever our role is, LinkedIn is probably going to be with us for quite some time, and learning how to improve our Social Selling Index is a formula and a discipline, and it's something that can be accomplished. It's where you can find companies like us and people like us that can help you leverage your skill sets and your knowledge to make sure people know what you're doing. With that, I hope what I've shared has been useful to you and your business and that you take note of these tools to improve your Social Selling Index on LinkedIn.